Posts Tagged ‘facebook’

Unless you are willing to pay…

Over the course of the last months, social media networks are crusading for real human interaction and engagement which I support. This comes as a bit of bad news for those people trying to do personal branding from real personal accounts. And yes, people looked at forms of automation (just like marketers do with marketing automation) but that is coming to a standstill or better slowdown.

In March 2018, Twitter undertook efforts to reduce the spam or similar tweets and no longer allows tweets to be posted from Hootsuite & Buffer to multiple accounts. As of August 1st, 2018 you can no longer use tools like Hootsuite or Buffer to post to personal profiles. LinkedIn has never supported any planning of messages from the platform but I wonder when they will banish posting via Hootsuite and Buffer and others.

Here is what the situation of the current automation of Facebook:

Content posting platforms such as Hootsuite, Buffer and alike -> GONE

Action/reaction tools like IFTTT or Zapier -> GONE

Auto post from Twitter to Facebook -> GONE

Employee Advocacy programs have to adapt but -> REMAIN

Share buttons on a website and others -> REMAIN

Auto post from Facebook to Twitter -> REMAIN

Auto post from LinkedIn to Twitter -> REMAIN

Click-2-Tweet unchanged -> REMAIN

But wait, could your account get suspended on Twitter for (Re)tweeting the standard text that is presented to you but the website, newspaper, Click-2-tweet or even the Employee Advocacy platforms? That remains to be seen…

Result = Let the money roll!

People who want to do personal branding are now forced to move a page on Facebook which drives your right to the Facebook bank. Since posts on pages get very limited traction, visibility, and impressions, you will have to pay for your personal branding (sponsored content) just like large corporations. Where is the authenticity in that?

Final thought

But here is the contradiction, while these platforms want you to post as a human being, they are bringing more and more bots online. This automation seems to be okay. Really?

Recruiting via social media just a little more interesting in Belgium. LinkedIn, the uncrowned champion for recruitment is now being challenged by Facebook and their job vacancy post.

Of course, people will say that LinkedIn is the platform to find “white” collar workers and Facebook “blue” collar workers but let’s be honest both categories use Facebook so the pool there is much bigger (in Belgium 3.4 million vs 7 million).

From an employer’s point of view, this offers some great opportunities and challenges. So let the battle begin.

The incumbent LinkedIn

LinkedIn recently changed the “job” vacancy approach. Here is a quick rundown of the process:

1. Define the basic job title and area

2. Complete the description

3. Define Skills and Experience levels

4. Payment options

You will notice that LinkedIn will indicate the number of candidates you might get after 30 days based on your budget. I get mixed messages from customers when it comes to results but I am sure LinkedIn will argue that it is the best way platform overall.

Now enters Facebook

Now that Facebook has added “Publish a Job Post”, I fear that this will become more popular than LinkedIn… Let take a look at the process here too:

Select the option for the post types

2. Enter the job description info

The biggest difference is that this is a post on your page and gets organic views. No just like any other post on Facebook you will need to increase the visibility by boosting (aka promoting) this post.

3. Payment options

There seems to be 9€/day minimum budget required by Facebook but the numbers here a little different. Rather than giving you an idea of how many people you might get to apply, Facebook will tell you how many people you could reach.

If you are looking for a more cost-efficient way to create visibility for your job openings on LinkedIn (on Facebook that is already the case), you might be considering posting the job openings as a public post on your company/fan page and promoting the post as “promoted content”. The final bill will be considerably less and your targeting options increased. Now whether the platforms will react quicker to this “improper” use of the platform is to be seen.

So, who will win the battle for talent? Or should I say, the “war for your money”? Not sure, but an interesting development altogether. What do you think? Drop your comments in the comment box below.

You will probably recognize the following scenario. You enroll for a training or webinar to learn new things. During the session there are a lot’s of tips and tricks you think you should implement but as you are keeping up with the pace, they get lost. And then we all suffer from the “I will do it tomorrow” syndrome. However, the next day we either forget or fall victim to our hectic business-as-usual where other fires have to be put out. Finally, we only implement less than 10% of what we learned.

I see this happening to too when people who learn all about LinkedIn or Social Media in trainings. As a trainer it is frustrating that all your good tips & tricks were no implemented (in the spur on the moment).

Recently, I came across an interesting app called Sombrero which actually starts where you left of in your social media training. This app acts as you guide and teacher but in small bits on a daily basis. I tried the app myself first and then spoke with the people from Sotrender, the company behind this app.

Getting started is simple!

Installing the app is easy and so is setting it up. Register your social media profiles like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and the small tasks start rolling in. The nice thing is that the app takes babysteps as the task are simple and take very short time to complete. The app gives you a real sense of accomplishment but still you are moving forward to professionalizing your social media presence. True, if you are already active the first days/week might be boring but it provides some good benchmarking on where you are.

As you move along the timeline, tasks become a bit more challenging but reflect how you should be running your social media. I found a great complement to my training program.

It is not all sunshine, of course!

What caught my attention is that there is bit of confusion around the target profiles: personal vs company profiles. The app wants to serve both and it is not always clear which way it tilts.

Since I mostly focus on B2B, LinkedIn is a major component. Unfortunately, this bit is missing today. I understand it will be coming in next versions.

Another little drawback is the fact that it is an English-only version and my feeling tells me that the audience best served is not always used to work in English.

Must-do!

Since this app is free (and there is no catch) and very educational, I think you try it on your smartphone or tablet. I am convinced that you will learn a thing or two even if you have some experience. The app really delivers when it comes pushing your boundaries and boosting your online performance.

I recently organized an event together with “ADM – Where Business meets ICT” on the subject of Employee Advocacy. It is a hot topic for many companies as the low hanging fruit for brand ambassadors has not been picked yet.

Here is what members of ADM taught us. The full list of questions are below in the appendix

Q1: What words come to mind when you hear the word “Employee Advocacy”?

Here is what the audience thought….

We all know that Employee advocacy” is a term used to describe the exposure that employees generate for brands & company using both their own online and offline assets.

Q2 – Q4 pertained to current Employee Advocacy

About 2 out 3 companies that took part in the on line survey during the event had a program in shape or form for EA. Most of the Advocacy seemed to happen on LinkedIn (45%) while Twitter and Facebook came in 2nd with about 23%. In most companies between 15% and 25% of employees are being advocates.

Q5: What Employee Advocacy programs do you know?

One thing that is clear is that even though there are many platforms out there, people seem to know few of them.

Q6 – Q8 pertained to who drives the EA initiative

Though marketing seems to be the biggest driver (46%), HR and communications are close seconds. Even though we seem to hear that incentives are the key to successful EA, most of the companies in the survey disagreed. Less than 30% offer incentives to their employees.

Now with Employee Advocacy comes the danger of having things go wrong so having a clear up to date social media policy is key. As my other research has shown about 50% of companies are not paying attention and have no or an outdated social media policy.

Q9: Who is responsible for the content that will be shared through Employee Advocacy?

The obvious answer seems to be marketing but stories from and by employees seem to be the trick to successful EA.

Conclusion

If your company want to start with an Employee advocacy plan a few steps need to taken:

Make sure you have a culture of sharing and openness

Update your social media policy

Have your employee create content

Implement an employee advocacy platform

Encourage sharing through a smart incentive plan

What are your thoughts, feedback and experiences? Love to hear from you

The last few weeks it has been raining negative messages around Twitter. But what if the Twitter whale really washed up on the beach what would the consequences?

Loss of employment

The first group of people impacted are those companies that make tools to slice and dice Twitter. There will be a lot of blood flowing on the floor. From monitoring platforms to posting platform and tools of all other kinds. I see you thinking: “It is only startups and who cares? But it is not only a large number of startups that would go out of business overnight but also some of the big players would get hurt and have to let go of people. Not to mention companies using these tools.

OMG! The Klout score could really disappear for real.

Companies and Organizations

Twitter has been the tool that many companies have used to provide customer service and/or get close to the r customers. All of a sudden they would lose their eyes and ears on their community, Back to phone canvassing or trying to move the communities to one of the remaining platforms. Let’s be honest, you don’t want the twitter type conversations on LinkedIn or even Facebook as a company.

Twitter users

And how about the users of Twitter. They would have so much time on their hands. No more checking their influencers (an retweeting or pressing like), no more content curation, no more personal branding tweets to be sent, no more customer service complaints, etc. just to name a few. What would they do with all this regained time?

Let’s be real, Twitter washing up on the beach would mean that we are left with only 2 real networks. Google+ has been catching rays on the beach for a while now. Would Tweeps really move to LinkedIn and/or Facebook with their content and messages?

What a nightmare that would be for both the platforms, companies and users. I can’t image what messages on LinkedIn will look like or how the amount of spam in LinkedIn groups will spiral as the (professional) influencers from Twitter flock to LinkedIn. What if more people started to complain about company services and products on Facebook (or LinkedIn for that matter)… Could customer service really move to Facebook? I guess Not!

Conclusion

The long and short is that Twitter is likely not to disappear, so stop whining and spreading negative news. I kind of want to come back to my predictions for 2015 in the sense that if Google with Google+ (They have the users) and Twitter (they have the content) should team up (Twoogle?) they can be a counterweight to the two protagonists. I wonder…

2009 is the year that social media breaks through on a large scale. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the likes are adding members quickly. I would like to call this the age of “consumersation of Social Media”.

But 2009 is also the year that we start seeing how naif people are. They post anything and everything on social media. They tarnish not only their own reputation but also that of the companies they work for. Some even get fired for their behavior. But also companies make mistakes with this young and new medium. And then companies do what companies do best: the lock down and lockout social media on the work floor!

They did however not count on the fact that mobile was also becoming a commodity. People creative as they are fled to these mobile devices to take part in social media during work hours. Companies had to do something: The social media policy was born!

2011 – 2012

When I did my survey about social media policies in companies, I found that only 1 in 5 companies had one. Even worse: within those companies less than 10% of the employees knew about it. This still holds true today. Social Media policies were merely a tick in the box.

Companies only made one when disaster struck. They created them as insurance policies.

2015: Time for a social media policy renaissance

We are now 2015 and there 3 important reasons why companies should revisit their social media policy or create one.

Reason #1: We all know that 2015 is the year of the video more specifically live-streaming. Apps such as Meerkat, Periscope or even Blab give every employee a live camera in their hand. What if they start live streaming your production process? What if they stream paying events? And this is just the beginning.

Reason #2: For years companies have been looking for ambassadors. They kept looking outside the company and forgot their biggest assets, the employees. Today Employee Advocacy is stepping into the limelight. Employees can amplify company approved content and get a higher organic reach. Today companies are using a number of tools from rFactr, over GaggleAmp to Sociabble or Smarpshare just to name a few. But what if your employee add comments to post that are not appropriate?

Reason #3: More and more companies are embracing Social Selling (aka the use of social media by sales to find leads and build relationships). We all know how disciplined sales people are and things can go wrong very quickly (and yes, this is black & white). You really need a policy to help this people with their social media.

And finally, people are still naif in this day and age. They are still being fired for posting stupid stuff.

So time for the renaissance of the social media policy. If yours is more than 2 years old, it is time for a revision.

Conclusion

From my current research, it looks like about 50% of the companies have as policy of which some are more than 2 years old. With social election in many companies coming up, it might be a good idea to include some paragraphs about union behavior and use of social within your enterprise.

In my next article I will focus on the how you make/update your current social media policy.

One of the biggest challenges on social media is when to post to get maximum reach. There is maybe one simple trick that will tell you when your connections and contacts are online: your birthday! Or better, when people wish you a happy birthday which means they are online. Time for me to do an experiment…

A few days ago (April 7th) it was my birthday. I took this opportunity to get an insight into when my contacts, friends and followers posted and mailed their best wishes. The sample size is a few hundred messages (about a third of my complete network) which is representative for my network on LinkedIn and Facebook. Twitter is the odd one out.

Here is what I observed:

LinkedIn

On LinkedIn messages started as of 2.21AM (A late night worker?). However the real stream started at 5.54 AM but with a first peak between 8AM and 9AM. The next burst came between 10 AM and noon. As of lunch the mails dropped down considerably but evened out over the afternoon and evening.

2 conclusions from these statistics and the fact that my network is evenly spread between Europe and the USA,

I can conclude that far more Belgians and Europeans than Americans use the tab “Keep in Touch”.

Also, my European network is stronger than my US network.

Facebook

On Facebook it started at 1AM (okay, that was someone who was up late 😉 ) but the real postings in Belgium started at 6AM. The first strong push was between 7AM and 8 AM slowly dropping down towards 9AM. However, my Spanish contacts got active at after 9AM.

The highest activity was measured in the afternoon starting at noon and going up from there. Things slowed down after 5PM. Here, I must admit, my network is more Belgian based than internationally.

Twitter

Amazingly enough, twitter only started at 9AM but that is because Twitter does not send people messages when it is your birthday. Here too the biggest number (how few those were) happened in the 2PM -5PM timeslot. But the number of messages is too small to make any real statement about when to post.

Conclusion

It is clear that if I want to reach my target audience posting between 7AM and 8AM (before work) and/or Noon – 5PM (at work?) are good times on Facebook. LinkedIn seems to be used by my contacts in the morning between 8 and noon. As far as Twitter is concerned I have no conclusive data to make any recommendation.

What do you think? Does this hold true for you too? How do you really know?

As one year comes to and end and the new year is about to start, we find ourselves in the time when annual reviews and 2015 predictions are plenty. I am slowly getting fed up with large number of posts about the future. BTW, which of the 2014 prediction come true? No one really checks.

It seems everyone has a crystal ball and is a futurologist or trend watcher. Where did the time go when Madame Soleil was the person to go to to get predictions for the new year. Nostalgia… I guess I must be a romantic.

Enough of “Video will be the preferred content form” or “Content Marketing finally matures” or “Everything mobile”! I do not want to hear this anymore, but under the mantra “if you can’t beat them, join them”, here is my spin on the predictions for 2015:

My 3 outrageous predictions for 2015!

Facebook will disappear this year!

For the last year or so, we have heard more and more people saying they want to stop their Facebook account because of the ever changing privacy rules or abundant advertising . But guess what? Facebook is not stupid and saw this coming. So they are launching Facebook for Business now. More constant and better money flow? Great move on their behalf except that most people use Facebook for private use (not business) and are shutting down their account. Why should companies get started on Facebook for Business. I guess death will quick.

Google+ finally gets off the ground

All those sleeping Google+ users (Gmail users, Android phone users, YouTube-ers, Bloggers, et al) finally realize they already have a Google+ account. Moreover, since they are running away from Facebook, Google+ becomes the next safe haven where their friends will be posting their personal updates. And yes, privacy is much better and less advertising. So getting to 1.6 billion members in 2015 will be a piece of cake. Sorry Ello.co or seen.it.

Microsoft buys LinkedIn

I can see you shake your head but think about it. Microsoft already owns the largest Enterprise Social Network (Yammer) which focusses on the intra-company social media so it make sense to add an external social media network to it. Business meets Business. And yes, Microsoft has the cash to burn. A marriage made in heaven for professional social media and networking. The benefit for LinkedIn will be that finally the company pages really get developed to create more value to the business users.

What do you think? Do you agree with any of these outrageous social media predictions? Do you have any you’d like to share? Please share your comments below.

The end of the year is slowly on the horizon. And with that come numerous competitions for “best in class”. One of these is the Datanews “CIO of the Year” competition.

Sometime ago (august) the list of the top 10 nominees was published. Each of the nominees was selected for having a good vision, strategic insight, leadership qualities and personality. And then is was up to the the public to vote who will be in the top 3! The winner will be crowned on November 20th in Brussels.

I started wondering how these CIO’s would go about promoting their candidacy for the top 3. One great place to do this is social media. Think of the success of #TVVV or #BGT. Since I had some reasearch (blogpost of April 2011) a long while back, I decided to take another look on social media. After all these years I expected the presence to be much improved. But no, it was again (still?) staggering to see their presence is very limited.

LinkedIn

All CIO’s have a reasonable complete profile and good amount of contacts. However, few have discovered the functionality of sharing a Status Update which could be formidable weapon in their quest to become one of the Top 3 CIO’s.

Only one CIO noticed that I visited their profile and wanted to connect. The rest did not even click back. Well I guess who will get my vote.

Twitter

7 out of the 10 do have a twitter account which I think is great. When it comes to tweeting few have masterd the art. They all remain under 300 tweets (all-time) and 50% have not tweeted at all. I just wonder if they know who is following they.

Facebook

Half the CIOs are on facebook. And of those who are, none of them have protected their friends and/or pictures. I would have thought they of all people would know something about privacy.

Google+

CIO’s seem not to missed Google+ completely. I think 3 have discovered it probably by accident but their profile lack content and general information. It is as good as empty. But then again, Google+ is considered to be the desert among social media platforms. Maybe CIO’s will move directly to ello.co?

Other platform

When it comes to leadership one would hope that CIO’s run a blog but unfortunately, I was not able to find one. Neither do they have a slideshare account or YouTube channel. But one could say this is only for marketing.

Conclusion

Even though their companies are using social media heavily, CIO’s themselves still have not discovered Social Media – the cloud applications that outrun any other application domain. It is clear that Social Media will have a minimal bearing on the winning of votes to be among the top 3. This was a sad conclusion on most of the profiles of the 10 CIO’s

There are all kinds of statistics around about when to post where and with what frequency in order to reach as many people as possible. Over the course of the summer, I conducted a survey among my LinkedIn contacts, Twitter followers and Facebook friends to understand their social media behaviour. Here are the results.

Twitter

Check Frequency: 45% check Twitter mulitple times per day. Add another 17% that checks it daily.

Check Peak: The prime moments for checking Twitter seems to be during and after work hours (over 70% for both categories). The morning seems to show the lowest activity and so do breaks.

Post Frequency: There is a wide spread which is linked to the large number of lurkers on Twitter. However, it seems that 43% tweet 1-3/week,. 27% do it between 1 and 3 times per day. Less than 10% tweet more than 5 times per day.

LinkedIn

Check Frequency: The use of LinkedIn for more than HR purposes is driving up the frequency with which people check LinkedIn. With over 35% checking multiple times/day and 29% daily we give LinkedIn a thumbs up. Amazingly enough 2% never visits their profile while the rest checks it once a month.

Check Peak: As can be expected with a “professional” networking platform, most people access it during the work day. An amazing 80% do it during work hours. Breaks, mornings and evenigs do not seem to be so popular. It si considered work.

Post Frequency: From experience I know people do not do many Status Updates on LinkedIn. The survey confirmed this again with 27% never posting and 33% only once a month. Less than 11% post daily on LinkedIn.

Facebook

Check Frequency: As expected over 65% check their Facebook multiple times per day. Adding the 17% of daily checkers and we can conclude we are addicted to Facebook!

Check Peak: Here too, not many surprises except the fact that before breakfast does not do so well. The highest peak lies in the evening after work.

Post Frequency: Since facebook has the highest degree of “lurkers” it is not surprising that weekly (42%) and daily (31%) post are the dominant numbers here.

Google what?

Yet again, Google+ demonstrates its ability to stay under the radar. Even though there are so many accounts (gmail users, android users, picasa users, youtube user, etc.) few people are even aware they have a G+ account. More that 60% never visit the account with another 10% that don’t even know they have such an account.

Conclusion

Though this research did not reveal anything dramatic, it confirms that LinkedIn is the professional tool of choice and tolerated in the workplace; Facebook the lurking tool into our realm of friends and brands; Twitter the platform no one really knows what to think of; and Google+ that special place in the desert!